November sped by. It passed way too quickly for me, and I can’t believe it’s already December.

I had hoped to rewrite book 1 this year. I thought, since it’s already a finished book, it should be fairly easy. Alas, that isn’t how it’s turning out. If it’d been a matter of words, I probably could’ve done it. However, this book was my first, my baby, and it was written with a healthy dose of youthful enthusiasm and Red Bull fueling my squirrel brain. After redoing the first few chapters and struggling to see the vision of where I was going, I decided to look at resources to improve this version, read books like Story Genius, brush up on my structure, and figure out the goals of each scene. Over the holiday weekend, I sat down and spent several days hashing out my sticky-note spreadsheet. I think I have my plan.

While the root of the story remains unchanged, I am changing a lot of things. I’m cutting events, renaming characters, and even removing a major aspect of my magic system, which means I’ll have to change a couple of things in book 2 and a scene that precedes book 3.5, but I think it’ll be better for book 1. That leads me to think about the question of the month.

IWSG Question of the Month – Do you write cliffhangers at the end of your stories? Are they a turn-off to you as a writer and/or a reader?

I prefer stories that have a sense of conclusion of one story or another. While I have epilogues in my own writing that promise more to come, I strive for satisfactory endings. It’s why I refuse to break up my book into smaller books. Plus, with how long it takes me to finish a book, it’d be a terrible decision to leave it hanging off a cliff.

However, book 3 in my 5 book series ends with my main guy in a bad state, and it won’t get resolved until book 4. Because of that, I won’t publish book 3 until I’ve written book 4. And I won’t publish book 2 until I’ve rewritten book 1. Hopefully that will be within the next year.

I’ve also finished a series of montages for my books! The background colors match up with the book covers, and the gray silhouettes represent the setting. The characters pictured are POVs, except for book 5. I don’t know what book 5 entails, other than it’s the whole family against the bad guys in the last epic battle. So book 5’s montage has Derek’s family, power-walking toward the conflict. And it also is during the book’s steampunk era (which starts in book 3.5, 150 years after book 3), so I had fun exploring fashion.

That is my vision for right now, and you can see Derek’s transformation over the series. I’m going to focus on my environments next. I want to represent my different locations. I think, once I get better at environments, I might get better at backgrounds and I can transition to painting scenes from my book. And someday, maybe, I can make a create a graphic novel. But first, I need to finish the series.

Have you ever rewritten a book and changed a lot? Do you like cliffhangers? What do you think of montages?

About Insecure Writer’s Support Group

You can find the sign up for the IWSG here. We owe Alex J Cavanaugh a huge thank you for thinking this blog hop up.